The U.S. Department of Interior: Putting animals before people, one scandalously rejected infrastructure project at a time

posted at 2:41 pm on June 5, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

I often lament the fact that the federal government currently owns and controls almost a third of the surface area of the United States, and that the federal agencies charged with the stewardship of these areas have over the decades succumbed to the considerable lobbying-and-litigating powers of environmentalist groups determined to impose their misbegotten and dastardly land-use policies onto ever-encroaching swaths of the American landscape. These radical and so-called conservationists have managed to prevent anything and everything from fire suppression activities to recreation to energy and commercial development — usually under the guise of protecting some sort of almost-threatened species — doing loads of damage to the environment in the process as well as systematically squeezing rural communities and economies.

A group of Alaska native tribes, corporations and city and borough governments representing residents of King Cove has filed a lawsuit in federal court in an attempt to get judges to do what U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has so far refused to do: allow a road to nearby Cold Bay.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Juneau, asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska to prevent Jewell and the Department of the Interior from stopping the road, which would be extended by 11 miles to allow residents of King Cove, in Southwest Alaska, better access to the all-weather airstrip at Cold Bay, about 19 miles away.

Jewell said in December 2013 that she wouldn’t allow the road, even though it had been approved by Congress and included a land swap that would have given the nearby Izembek National Widlife refuge 60,000 acres of land for about 200 acres of road access. …

Jewell has said that the road would impose on eel grass beds — favorite nesting beds for Pacific black brant and emperor geese. Jewell said she wanted the King Cove villagers to come up with alternatives to building a road.

So… Jewell wants to protect the “favorite nesting beds” of some birds, which, by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service‘s own definition, “breed over an extensive range in Alaska, Arctic Canada and Russia”? That’s certainly interesting. Let’s compare that to the King Cove residents’ justification for wanting to build a road through this apparently treasured wildlife refuge in the middle of a state that is basically one giant wildlife refuge itself.

King Cove only has a small medicine clinic that can’t handle major medical emergencies, and they only have one airstrip that can’t handle jets or takeoffs and landings at night or in poor weather. The weather is often poor in King Cove, Alaska, meaning that with all of the wind and fog, medical evacuations for sick and/or injured residents are basically impossible. King Cove would like to build this 11-mile road to connect them to another town with a better airstrip, which Congress has approved and for which they have offered a more than fair 60,000 acres of land in return, but the U.S. Department of Interior keeps denying their request and wants them to “come up with alternatives to building a road.” So far, they have already tried boat as well as hovercraft connections between the two towns, to no avail.

Yes, this is real life.

Just take a look at the Department of Interior’s official announcement last December denying King Cove the road access through the refuge:

WASHINGTON, DC – As directed by Congress in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell today concluded a four-year analysis, and issued a decision supporting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s preferred alternative to decline a proposed land exchange with the State of Alaska and prevent construction of a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which was first established in the 1960s.

The nearly four-year analysis on the effects of the proposed land exchange, including the impact a road would have on Izembek’s vital ecology and congressionally-designated wilderness helped to inform the Secretary’s decision. In addition, a personal visit to the Refuge and the King Cove and Cold Bay communities as well as a report from the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs regarding the medical evacuation benefits of the proposed road were considered.

Got that? The U.S. Department of Interior is spending your tax dollars doing a four-year environmental impact review of a proposed 11-mile road that can save human lives, simultaneously forcing King Cove residents to spend their own time and resources to come up with alternatives.

Why, why, why is any of this up to the grossly unjust and ideological whimsy of the federal bureaucracy rather than the state of Alaska?

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The government often places animals ahead of people (e.g. destroying the farmland of central California to protect minnows).

bw222 on June 5, 2014 at 2:46 PM

Destroying the farmlands, bankrupting the families that owned them into foreclosure so the spouses of boxer and pelosi can grab that same dusty land and develop it, or resell it to developers after the spigots are turned back on.

Lets not forget what all that new dusty wasteland will do to everything east of that area that was shut down. More environmental destruction, all courtesy of your local communist democrat progressives.

These radical and so-called conservationists have managed to prevent anything and everything from fire suppression activities…

Those of us in the White Mountains of NE Arizona have them to thank for the Rodeo-Chedeski fine in 2002 which, at that time was the largest wildfire in AZ’s history. We had moved to Show Low, AZ, from Texas (jokingly I said to escape tornados, one of which had recently hit downtown Fort Worth and the area of Arlington we lived in) just a couple of months before the fire started (and the week-long evacuation which soon followed).

For several years after the fire, there was a large billboard in Heber-Overgaard which said “Thanks, environMENTALists for the Rodeo-Chedeski fire” and then listed the number of acres burned, residences destroyed, etc.

Here’s how to get your road, Alaska: come to AZ and transport back to AK a few truckloads of illegal aliens. Then tell Interior that the road is essential for the illegals to be able to make it to the polling place on election day.

You’ll have your road approval in no time. The federal government will probably even volunteer to build the damn road for you.

I’d just build it and make them come in with the armed federal thugs…
Laws be damned…what difference does it make anyway???…
PatriotRider on June 5, 2014 at 2:54 PM</blockquote
And don't, under any circumstances, use union labour…you'll want it done ASAP AND correctly the first time ;-)

Because ecolibs living in concrete jungles imagine themselves hiking through pristine wilderness during their time off, then back to their 24/7 modern city without all those mosquitoes and ticks but WITH all the modern conveniences.

There isn’t one of them who wouldn’t be aghast to discover that Cold Bay doesn’t have a Starbucks, a pet therapist, or live Broadway-scale theater productions.

Their methods serve multiple purposes, not the least of which is pushing more of the population into dense urban areas, where it’s easier to keep an eye on them and they are constantly at risk of rising seas or whatever else needs to be cited to justify higher taxes.

Because ecolibs living in concrete jungles imagine themselves hiking through pristine wilderness during their time off, then back to their 24/7 modern city without all those mosquitoes and ticks but WITH all the modern conveniences.

There isn’t one of them who wouldn’t be aghast to discover that Cold Bay doesn’t have a Starbucks, a pet therapist, or live Broadway-scale theater productions.

Bishop on June 5, 2014 at 3:13 PM

And they think it’s ok to give a grizzly bear a hug to show him you care….

Jewell has said that the road would impose on eel grass beds — favorite nesting beds for Pacific black brant and emperor geese. Jewell said she wanted the King Cove villagers to come up with alternatives to building a road.

If the road was built, the emperor geese would find other eel grass nesting sites somewhere in those 60,000 acres.

Proof that the Obama Administration doesn’t have the sense God gave geese.

It’s racism, pure and simple! It’s a war on Native Americans! It’s an outrageous decision that tramples on the rights of the Noble Other, due purely to the color of their skin and their heritage!

I’d sue on the grounds that it’s the Obama administration’s deliberate and willful efforts to persecute the Native Americans, if not an outright effort to slowly exterminate them by denying them the means to seek medical attention.

Interior Secretary Scrunt flies up to King Cove to have a look-see for herself. Schedules this trip just ahead of a major weather event.

As the weather event unfolds, local wildlife officials accidentally loose control of a venomous snake, for whose venom the nearest source of antivenin is Anchorage.

Wishing to meet this benevolent benefactor of all things wild, the snake approaches Secretary Scrunt and tries to shake her hand with its fangs. Venomous agony ensues.

The weather event makes use of the King Cove airport impossible until storm passes. Locals calmly tell Secretary Scrunt that she’ll just have to wait to be flown there for treatment as they figure out alternatives to building a road to the Cold Bay airport.
As she writhes in agony, passing flocks of emperor geese and Pacific black brant drop a barrage of goose goo on her miserable head.

Here is the alternative Jewell would like: Move out of King Cove and into an efficiency apartment in Anchorage. Environmentalists would like nothing more that for everyone to live urban, except for those environmentalists who think urban development is bad for the environment.

That’s because the purpose in life of these people is to protect the animals. It is not to protect the people.
When thinking of government agencies I’m always reminded of Ben Rich’s recollections of dealing with one of the auditors:
“The chief auditor came to me during a plant visit and said: “Mr, Rich, let me get something straight: I don’t give a damn if you turn out scrap. It’s far more important that you turn out the forms we require” (Ben Rich Skunk Works p. 80)
To the chief auditor, it didn’t matter whether Lockheed/Skunk Works were successful or not in building the F-117. All he cared about was his tasks.

Here is the alternative Jewell would like: Move out of King Cove and into an efficiency apartment in Anchorage. Environmentalists would like nothing more that for everyone to live urban, except for those environmentalists who think urban development is bad for the environment.

tdarrington on June 5, 2014 at 3:33 PM

Exactly!

Or better yet, go back to living the way Native Americans lived in Alaska 500 years ago! How dare they want modern medicine!!

I certainly don’t doubt your notion that it’s also a part of the War on Rural America, but that itself is a part of the larger War on America. Every tradition or ideal this country ever held is under attack right now. Everything that made us great has been or is being undermined.

Maybe the villagers should build a bridge.
The eco nuts in Missoula, MT, decided to fight the noxious weed problem on Mt Jumbo by placing sheep on the hill to eat the stuff. They even hired a sheep herder to watch the sheep, paying him minimum wage plus donations from generous libs in town. Maybe this is why the guy stopped showing up. This year the wild big horn sheep rams heard about all the girls foraging on the hill and decided to join them. The eco nuts couldn’t let that happen so they have decided to kill all the wild rams who show up. This just after a story in the local rag bemoaning the fact that big horn sheep numbers are down drastically in the state. I’ll never figure these people out.

The government often places animals ahead of people (e.g. destroying the farmland of central California to protect minnows).
bw222 on June 5, 2014 at 2:46 PM

If you go back about 6 or 7 years when the California Delta smelt population became the rallying cry for changing almost all water rights in California, it was predicted droughts would shut down farming in the Golden State. Everyone laughed, because gummint always knows better. Now, Cali gummint and the feds are trying to figure out where all the veggies went to and have no idea what to do about the current drought, so they are blaming it all on global warmingclimate changeclimate weirding the changing climate caused by Republicans or the Kochs or something…

Destroying the farmlands, bankrupting the families that owned them into foreclosure so the spouses of boxer and pelosi can grab that same dusty land and develop it, or resell it to developers after the spigots are turned back on.

Bingo. Eliminate the generally conservative and independent small family farms/businesses who are forced to sell what they have for pennies on the dollars, to the likes of Monsanto or ADM, or just go out of busines, since they have been over-regulated and other government imposed costs on them makes it impossible to continue. The buyers being, most likely multinational firms with close ties to our politicians, either for more subdivisions of houses or business parks on an urban fringe, or for larger corporate farms. And the spigots will be turned on and endangered species will be ignored or found to be not so endangered after all.

Cali gummint and the feds are trying to figure out where all the veggies went to and have no idea what to do about the current drought, so they are blaming it all on global warming climate change climate weirding the changing climate caused by Republicans or the Kochs or something…

Thats okay, its perfectly fine for us to pay higher prices for and be dependent upon imported produce. It’s just addressing the issue of food inequality. We’ve been eating more than our share.

The solution is armed resistance to tyranny. Build the road and F the feds. You are mistaken that the fed owns 30% of all the land in the US, it owns ALL the land in the US by legal and regulatory fiat. Revolution is the only answer.